Recreational Areas Matter

Story posted Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Resident Fights Plan To Plop Wind Turbines On Lake Michigan

By TODD WESSELL Journal & Topics Editor

For the last 35 years, longtime Des Plaines resident Emil Schwarz has regularly driven south around Lake Michigan and straight north on Highway 31 to his small home in Pentwater, Michigan.

Pentwater, with its population of approximately 1,000, is a scenic, quiet village known for its summer music concerts at the village green and its close proximity to Lake Michigan.

If a newly-formed company has its way, however, Schwarz and many other local residents believe Pentwater and the 100-mile long coastal stretch from Muskegon on the south to Ludington on the north will dramatically alter the area for the worse.

Scandia Wind Offshores (SWO) is hoping to apply for state lease permits sometime in the first quarter of 2010 to develop a huge wind farm along the western shoreline of Lake Michigan. If all the necessary permits are granted following a process that could take years, the coastal landscape in that region will be filled with as many as 200 rotating, white wind turbines. Plans call for the windmills to jut out of the water at a maximum location of 3.7 miles from land.

The purpose of the billion-dollar project is to let the west and southwesterly winds generate electricity that eventually could serve large urban centers such as Detroit and Chicago. The spot across Pentwater is considered ideal because of wind speeds that can regularly reach 20 mph, which are normally only attainable in states such as North Dakota and Texas.

A similar kind of wind farm is located along I-65 north of Indianapolis. Unlike the proposed development, the Indiana operation is located on land.

The proposal has created an abundance of controversy pitting those who want to leave the lake undisturbed against others who believe a wind farm is an ideal way to generate cheap, environmentally clean electricity with little disruption.

"I don't like to see anything on the lake," said Schwarz during a telephone interview with the Journal & Topics Newspapers last week. "It's such a great asset."

Schwarz said that while his home is not directly located on Lake Michigan, he believes allowing 200 wind turbines to be erected and easily observed from the shoreline is wrong.

A Des Plaines resident for the last 40 years, Schwarz values the quality time he spends in his quiet west central Michigan home.

"It's like going to the beach and seeing wind turbines out there," Schwarz added. He has weighed in on the issue by voicing his concerns in local newspapers and will continue to do so as the process of allowing or rejecting the proposal runs its course.

Scandia is in the process of trying to gauge local opinion and support before it moves forward.

More public meetings are scheduled in mid-January.